Upgrade Equipment Proactively
Overall upgrading networks proactively is not just about preventing past issues but:
- Reducing possible outages
Each piece of equipment in the network is a point of failure (firewall, switches, wifi, battery backups). If the equipment burns out…. We do have some inventory for true emergencies in our office…. But it can take 2-5 days to ship replacements. With Faust being so dependent on the internet (salesforce, files, phones) it would be very disruptive if the core switch dies, or core firewall etc. If it dies the same week a hurricane hits or a big storm disrupts shipping in the middle of the country…. It could be days of outages. (We have ordered replacement firewalls “overnight priority” with Fedex that took 4 days to get here due to a mega snow storm that hits the middle states for example)Also if the network racks are not done properly and the wires are a mess…. Its much harder to service if something does go down. This is an extreme example…. But servicing a rack and trying to find which piece of equipment failed on the left is infinitely more difficult then when the team does it right from the start. We can swap failed equipment and find it in 15 minutes vs sometimes could involve escalating to a more senior engineer and trial and error, unplugging cables, etc.
Also older equipment is not tied into our central cloud management components and we don’t get alerts for it and cant resolve things remotely. For example if your firewall fails and its not a modern firewall…. We have to reconfigure it all from scratch. But newer firewalls take a backup of their configurations into our cloud so if it fails we can just order a new one and “flash” all the settings on it.
- Network speed
The network itself runs as fast as the slowest component. So if the networks have older firewalls, switches, wifi or internet providers its affecting everyone. Network equipment does not age as fast as cell phones…. But if the networks have not been modernized in 5+ years…. Its essentially like using a 3-4 year old iPhone. It works…. But everyone on that network is for sure not moving as fast as they could be. Every click, webpage load, phone call is moving slower than if it would on a faster network. - Security
If the firewalls in place is not a modern device its missing key security layers where people have a higher chance to go to a bad link. you can read more about it here
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/next-gen-firewall
(Some of the locations already have some of the newer firewalls, switches and wifi)
At some point every piece of equipment will fail. So its not a matter of if but when. And the goal is trying to time it when you already received all the benefits and used the equipment for its expected life…. And before the equipment becomes a liability for outage or slows people down.
